Oh, that feeling of being stuck in a box. Don’t you hate it? Sure, it’s easy to think outside the box—if you work in the arts, you do it all the time. (Especially when the phrase “thinking outside the box” is just an industry euphemism for “how can we make this happen with no money”.)
Being stuck in a box, after all, often accrues higher market value. This morning, a friend in my Facebook feed shared a link to Chuck Klosterman’s recent GQ cover story on Taylor Swift, and wondered, in the midst of ongoing print losses, how the entertainment journalist “has any drive to churn these out 15 or so years in, complete with that formulaic sprinkle of cloying self-awareness.” Churning it out, like Warhol and his celebrity portraits, pays the bills. The gallerist (and collectors) ultimately want you to keep doing slight variations on the same thing.
Yet Ryoya Usuha, a Japanese artist and filmmaker, illustrates how this conundrum is often of our own making. The seamless cutting between tumbling box and tumbling body suggests that as much as we can blame others for boxing us in, we play a large part in creating the box we throw ourselves into.
The GIF is taken from the 2014 short, “How to wear sound.” In it, you see a figure tape up a cardboard box, and throw it against the wall. The box’s smack against the wall is looped, creating a pounding propulsive beat, and the figure’s body is slowly faded into supplementing the box. This mingling between live action and animation continues in different scenarios throughout the work: see box-cum-body tumble out of air, from a tree, and so on and so forth.
How to wear sound from mikyokyuji on Vimeo.
It’s fairly common for artists to create GIFs based on long-form video or animated works. In the social media context, it allows the artists to disseminate the work widely (#gif), reaching an audience beyond the Vimeo community and film festival circuit. But as much as I like “How to wear sound”, I actually find the GIF more impactful — the fade-in is eliminated, the sharp cut between body and box seems more true to the intent of the work. When you’re stuck in a box of your own making, you’re stuck in a loop. And like banging your head against a wall, you’re not going to fade in and out — you have to tear off the tape and dismantle.
Comments on this entry are closed.